Saturday, April 20, 2013

Cal Day Celebrations Ignore Reality

It’s Cal Day, which from the perspective
of a grumpy grad student, means that it’s hard to find anywhere on UC Berkeley’s
campus to do work in peace, quiet and comfort.The sound of the band, the echoes of the cheering, and the peals of
self-congratulation permeate every corner of the University.

There is certainly much to be proud of
on the flagship UC campus, generally regarded as the nation’s best public
university, home to 35,000 students, a National Lab, top-ranked departments,
cutting edge research in most fields, a fantastic library system, and an array
of academic and research units.

There will be speeches at various venues
on campus plugging Berkeley to incoming students, alumni, and donors.And while much of what they will say will be
true, they will undoubtedly fail to omit the declining state in which Berkeley
and the University of California more broadly, find themselves.This bubble of pride was burst at the end of
last month by a
New York Times editorial, on “Resurrecting
California’s Public Universities”.

The editorial outlined the process by
which California’s “once-glorious system of higher education effectively
cannibalized itself, shutting out a growing number of well-qualified students”,
while the legislature “cut the higher education budget to ribbons, while
spending ever larger sums on prisons”.The
paper’s editorial board decried a “Legislature..awash in bills that seem to
assume that online education is the answer to the problem”, singling out as “particularly
ludicrous” a measure proposing a “New University of California”.

The Times
noted that “despite growing demand, spending on higher education over the last
decade has declined by 9 percent while expenditures for corrections and
rehabilitation have shot up by more than a quarter”.This has led to “many of the state’s
brightest students...attending schools in other states, raising fears that they
might never come back”.

Republicans and Democrats alike, finally
waking up to some of these dangers, are pushing online education with all their
might.This is due to its cheapness, to
its capacity to usher in vouchers by the back door, and because of the
technology fetish.They need to take a
long, hard look at the serious drawbacks of a system of online education, and
at the implications of continued de facto disinvestment from UC.Some campus chancellors are already pushing
for what amounts to a break-up of the system (higher rates of differential
tuition, for example), and if Californians continue to treat their University
system with such disdain, they run the risk of losing one of their state’s best
institutions.

The triumphalism on campus today should
be tempered by a close look at the reality: declining state funding, increasing
student fees, the commercialisation of the University, and an increasingly
utilitarian mentality towards research.I
expect that in ten or twenty years’ time, our universities will look very
different.And based on present trends,
it won’t be for the better.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.